How to Reach a Million People Through Content Marketing

You are the only one reading this. There’s one aspect of relationship marketing that’s often overlooked. When you are creating content, you may end up with an audience of millions but you are speaking to just one person at a time.

There are thousands of us looking at a viral article on BuzzFeed or a trending video on YouTube, but we each consume content alone. We are with our smartphones and our laptops, and while we may be surrounded by people, we are in our own little one-on-one world. It’s fine to want to connect with thousands of viewers, but that’s not the way you should be designing your content.

Aim for a very intimate relationship with your reader. This advice comes from my early reporter training at NPR. A seasoned journalist explained to me that when you get in the booth, you are speaking to one person. Imagine that you are telling your most intimate stories to your best friend. Only one person at any given moment is listening.

That’s the kind of tone you want to achieve, and you can do it in many ways. Sometimes you want to share something exciting, and other times you want to whisper.

Get your head around this very basic idea if you want to foster the kind of customer lifecycle relationship you need to grow your business. Content marketers must acknowledge and speak to that solitary state to achieve a long term customer relationship. Check out Monica Montesa’s article about H2H marketing to get another perspective.

Marketers are forever chasing the holy grail of reach. But the irony of reach is that the only way to grow your audience is one person at a time. You may have 4500 Twitter followers, but each one wants to be treated like they mean something special to you.

These days, there’s enough data available to figure out exactly who you’re talking to and what they want to know. Leverage that data, and then add a heaping helping of humanity to everything you publish.